Corusca

These recent short vacations and some other events have changed my view on several things. Not really getting into detail here, as the majority of my insights are irrelevant to most reading this.

So. I had very nice, yet short, vacations with my fiancé in the snow (photos are up). I’d never actually made a snowman, or been in a snowball fight, or riden a sled through the snow. All new experiences in very good company made these vacations to remember. I’m glad we took the trip. I kept feeling sucky, by always going to the same places and having the same routine, aside from a thing or two.

Speaking of which, I really enjoyed Friday night’s dinner (well, just tea for me as I’d explode into a million pieces if I ingested any solids), with Dave, Vanessa and Inês, as well as my sweetie, of course. Was really needing some time outside, and am only sorry that I may have vented about things, a bit too much. Ah well. Thanks for the invite, guys. Was a much needed, change of scenery and company. :)

Also, had a nice time on a friend’s birthday dinner, talked to a few people I don’t see much, including one of our guild’s mages who volunteered to level his priest when I mentioned our lack of healers being a problem. I’m slowly becoming an unofficial ‘recruitment officer’ for healers for my guild though it’s not my job at all. Everyone was wearing some sort of mask to celebrate the Carnival, and I also took some photos which I’ll upload shortly (only had time to take care of two food photos). The cookie cake was really yummy (gotta try making one sometime!), and I only refrained from eating more because I’d burst. :P

While I was out, I read a tiny bit more of GRRM’s A Storm of Swords. I need to free up some time for ‘myself’, to read more, and play games other than World of Warcraft. I’m not quitting WoW or anything, but between emos, drama, and other constants, the most fun I’ve had in the last week was on a PUG with nice people (though not all great players) in Utgarde Keep with my Retribution Paladin.

And it’s not just because i’m playing a different class (though admittedly, I’m enjoying melee/holy DPS a lot), it’s because I’m playing something different. Naxx has been mostly boring lately. I’ve noticed lack of focus even on some farm bosses, and before I was only on ‘daisies mode’ during most of the trash (exception to Gargoyles and other more ‘complicated’ stuff). I don’t screw up on my functions or anything like that, it’s simply boring and doesn’t really require 100% focus most of the time.

I’ve been wanting to play other games for a while, and it was even one of my resolutions for 2009. Considering my laptop will have to go to get repaired due to constantly not booting on the first try (sometimes only at the 10th try), I will be stuck with either a desktop that’s not mine (though a decent one for WoW), or my old laptop for a month or so. And I’m not really happy about that prospect. That might mean me playing with horrible FPS and graphical settings to a minimum, and although I endured it on occasion, during the TBC, doing boss encounters like Vashj with a crappy frame rate was not fun.

What better time than this to maybe play a bit more Xbox 360? I’ve barely played The Force Unleashed, Assassin’s Creed and GTA4. I feel like playing RPGs but sadly, we don’t own any non-Japanese RPGs for the XBox and I’m fairly allergic to JRPG’s turn-based combat system. Also, a good time to catch up with my reading, since my pile o’ unread books has grown. I did manage to finish reading The Tipping Point recently, and can reccomend it to those who enjoy the occasional non-novel book from time to time. now reading some manhwa, Chunchu vol. 2, and George R. R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords. All very slowly.

I’ve been having lots of decoration ideas for our house. We’ve recently placed some japanese and chinese paintings on the walls of our hall, a sort of asian-looking ‘rug’, and the lose cable we had there for ages is finally solidly stuck to the wall. But after that we haven’t done anything else decoration-wise. We do need to tidy up some stuff, like the chaos that is our office, and try to organize our room so it doesn’t look like someone grabbed all our clothes and threw them in the air, leaving them where they landed. But to decorate we need time to shop and bricolage, and we have more pressing matters to attend.

Like taking care of a ton of stuff for the wedding, such as finishing the wedding invitations, order some stuff from an online store for the atendees’ gifts, going to the Civil Registry soon (maybe next week?), getting my passport done soon, checking out sites and contacting travel agencies to see what there is for Thailand for our honeymoon (still not 100% decided but we seem to both be leaning toward it even if its slightly more expensive than, say, Mexico), and a million other things. Planing a wedding? Exhausting.

Before I head off to my mini vacations, I leave you with the Mass Effect 2 trailer BioWare has recently released. Pretty awesome… and mind boggling.

Have a nice rest of the weekend.